Once, when they were children and their parents returned from an evening out, not long before their mother and Robert died, Daniel and four-year-old Elizabeth had watched from behind the balustrade on the second landing, their stuffy older brother off on his own. When Mama had waved to them behind Father’s back as he loudly proclaimed he’d never again waste his time attending another loathsome performance, the two had stifled giggles. As always, when Father grumped about, Mama attempted to pacify the ogre, her sincere words complimenting the singers and majestic show drifting sweetly up the stairs and causing little Ellie to vow in a whisper, “I declare, the op’ra must be the most splendid thing in the whole world.”
“Aye,” he’d agreed, “Mama always has loved the op-p-pera.”
Then Elizabeth had turned to him and promptly asked what it was.
He laughed at the memory. Upon becoming the marquis two years ago, he’d purchased a box for the very same reason—to honor his mother. And he’d yet to use it, even once. “Take Ellie,” he said now, “and use my…box.” When Wylde started to protest again, Daniel sliced his arm through the air. “T-trust me. Have you attended together?”
“Nay.”
“Then that is the magic you seek. Now come.” A deep breath, then, “Tell me of this”—blasted—“issue you wish me…to speak for. What and when?” Perhaps he could manage to come down with a bang-up case of severe laryngitis on the day in question?
“Are you quite positive about the opera? Is there not something else—”
“Have you…been?” Damn. He could feel the muscles in his neck and jaw tightening with the effort to talk without faltering. And this was a casual meeting with one of his closest friends.
Aye, but it follows Elizabeth’s unexpected visit and wholly unanticipated mention of marriage. It follows Penry’s note, your own thoughts of taking a new mistress, two months of sporadic sleep and the worst lapse you’ve had in years. It also follows almost seeing your sister tumble down the stairs because a sweeping kiss knocked her off balance—or, more likely, her own reaction to said kiss.
Pah! Excuses, one and all.
How was he to get on in public without coming across as a sapskull? How would he get on tonight? Gad. Why could he not simply order up a fulsome wench (one whose wattles didn’t hear would do nicely) to present herself in his bedchamber? Have her ply sweet words and warm fingers along his lonely shaft?
While that image might have tightened another part of his anatomy, it did relax his neck. Willing his teeth to unclench and his tongue to cooperate, he clarified, “Been together?”
“What? I’m not following you.”
No surprise, as he’d bumbled about long enough. Fortunately, unlike those who sometimes tried to finish his sentences for him, Wylde had the wherewithal to wait patiently, regardless of situation or circumstance, and allow Daniel to find his own way, his own words. “The opera. Have you…with Ellie? Ever?”
“If you’ll recall, this is our first joint trip to London. I’ve never really had the opportunity to take her much of anywhere.” His face picked up a degree of animation that had been missing since his arrival. “I’d originally planned to shower her with numerous outings. I’d thought to surprise her, But that was before…” Wylde’s features froze into a frustrated mask. “Never mind. Just tell me what to do.”
“Trust me. Regard-d-less of what she claims, she wants to…go.” He’d give it a few weeks and see if things turned, if Elizabeth appeared happier and not just resigned with her marriage before demanding more of an explanation. “Now. About this speech you want me to sputter through…”
“You look like a damn Scot.” Wylde jumped on the new topic with relish, coming closer to sink into the very chair Elizabeth had occupied a short while ago.
A slice of sunlight beamed past Daniel’s shoulder and onto his desk, bright and cheery. The clouds had moved on then, the sky clearing. Might he hope the remainder of his day was to follow? His fingers went to the bristle covering the bruise. “What of it?”
“You’ll have to carve that scruff off your face before you speak.”
That was the least of his concerns. “And if I…don’t acquaint my jaw with the sharp edge of a razor, what then?” Am I to be exempt from showing myself to be a bumblehead?
Assuming the whiskers in question would be gone as advised, Wylde took several folded sheets from his pocket and slid them across the desk. “This covers the salient points and history of the matter. It also highlights what I hope you’ll vocalize.”
“When?”
“The vote is scheduled for next week. Tuesday afternoon, but I’ll have to check to confirm the time—”
“I have plans Tuesday next.”
Wylde gave a bark of laughter. “We both know you never have plans.”
While that was generally the case, Daniel was tempted to shove the advertisement under Wylde’s nose. So much for debating the merits of concealing his idiocy versus his desire to hear a man he respected speak on a topic he adored.
Damn. It looked as though Fate had made the decision for him.
Daniel turned to the last page Wylde had supplied and scanned the summary section. It looked like some rot about escalating crime and city patrols.
If he practiced each line a few thousand times, then maybe…
“I’ve kept them as succinct as I could,” Wylde cajoled. “Just take your time, speak deliberately as you always do and I daresay you’ll do fine. It’ll be over in a trice.”
“I still d-d-don’t fathom why you or Harrison can’t speak for this. Keep me out of it save for the vote.” He could promise to show for that, surely. Though he’d inherited his father’s seat on the committee along with the title, he’d yet to attend a single meeting. It appeared his cowardice had finally caught up with him.
“Except for your prowess in the ring and your long-standing association with Louise, you’re an unknown. If you show up and make a case for this, I’m betting the obstinate pig-heads will listen. Besides, Harry has his hands full with the corn regulations and we both know I have no reputation to speak of.”
“I wonder why,” Daniel muttered with unmistakable sarcasm. It was no secret that Wylde had left two women standing at the altar. Daniel didn’t know the circumstances surrounding the jilts but Ellie did. When Wylde had come sniffing after Elizabeth, once their father was gone and the proper mourning period observed, she’d demanded an explanation before agreeing to his suit. Daniel had left them alone so Wylde could make it.
“Sodding politics!” Wylde exploded. “I only volunteered to serve on this damn committee so I could gain an audience with your father and plead my case for Elizabeth’s hand.” That was news. “The lobprick squashed my hopes in that regard just as he squashed this bill time and again. And now I’ve come to care—”
“He chaired the commit-t-tee?”
“For years,” Wylde grated out.
His father had been against this bill? And now Wylde was giving him a chance to support it? Knowing that made all the difference in the world.
Daniel waved his arm, indicating the pages Wylde had prepared. “I’ll study.”
As though Wylde didn’t sense Daniel’s capitulation, he continued trying to sway him. “I’m set to chime in the moment you’ve said your piece and a number of others are lined up as well, but we’re still in the minority. Too many stubborn, stodgy old codgers hanging on to their old and outdated ways. But we just might be able to turn the tide this time. Every voice will count.”
That’s what I’m afraid of. Too bad his had betrayed him since birth.
Wylde stood. “Whatever you do, don’t be late.”
Daniel grimaced. Of course he was going to be late.
He was always late. One of the subtle ways he’d found to avoid people. And especially conversations.
2
To Be or Not to Be…A Fallen Woman
“Ah, Mrs. Hurwell, I trust we won’t be toppling into any displays today?”
Dorothea Hurwell’s companion, who had followed her across the threshold in time to hear the churlish greeting, turned to the clerk manning the bookseller’s entrance. “Ah, Mr. Tumson,” Sarah cooed back in a sickeningly sweet voice Dorothea knew didn’t bode well, “I trust we don’t mean to be an obsequious toad? Especially toward someone who indulges in her love of books exclusively at your establishment?”
“Indulges?” The prissy man sniffed, giving Dorothea a nasty smirk as she struggled to close her dripping umbrella—and struggled to resist the urge to gouge the pointy end into the unsuspecting anatomy between his legs. “When she’s only indulged in buying one book in all the time I’ve worked here?”
Poised as ever, Sarah efficiently closed her own umbrella without ever taking her eyes off the man. Their unusual color and shape—a stormy grey and uptilted at the outer corners—was rather captivating, and at the moment, the clerk appeared completely snared. “I was speaking of myself, for a slight to anyone I’m with cuts deeper than one aimed at me alone. And we both know I have a predilection toward collecting a positively obscene number of books. Now, mind you locate some manners the next time you see us or I’ll see to it your subsequent task is locating another position. Are we understood?”
He blanched. “Aye, Ms. Vinehart. My apologies, Mrs. Hurwell.” A politely subdued nod to each of them preceded his hasty backward retreat. Right into the downpour.
Dorothea muffled a laugh as he scrambled to circle the customer who’d just wrenched the door open against the flailing winds that had plummeted the temperature in the last hour. “Fitting,” she murmured when the rude clerk faltered on the slick cobblestones. “I daresay, that’s what he gets wasting time maligning me when he should have been manning the door as assigned.”
“You have the right of it,” her companion agreed, straightening the fingertips on her gloves. “I vow, if he had any more unwarranted airs, he’d float off like a giant balloon.”
“If you’d be so kind as to bottle some of your aplomb, I do believe I’d scrape together the funds to buy it,” Dorothea told her sincerely, fisting her chilled fingers in their threadbare gloves around the umbrella handle. “Thank you for coming to my defense.”
Having anyone stand up for her, since her dear mother departed decades too early, was such a novelty Dorothea never failed to notice and appreciate.
“Would that it weren’t necessary.” That she hadn’t fallen on such dire times. But alas, every day was a new opportunity—and one step beyond the smothering silence imposed by her now-deceased spouse. She felt her lips curved in a rueful, embarrassed quirk. “Or that I could defend myself so ably.”
“Think nothing of it.” Sarah surveyed the ground floor of Hatchards Booksellers. The murky weather had driven a fair number of people indoors, far more than they typically saw this early in the day. “It’s too crowded down here. Shall we explore the upper floors?”
Knowing that their presence in the shop was due to its convenience as a meeting place much more than either’s desire to select reading material—at least this particular morn—Dorothea gave her umbrella one last shake before placing it in the bucket set aside to collect the abundance of drips. “Of a certainty, let’s.”
Of medium-to-short height (Dorothea always preferred to put the “medium” first), her feet traipsed up the stairway swifter than her tall friend, as she took two steps to every one of Sarah’s.
Unlike most Thursdays when they casually browsed the latest offerings on the street level while speaking in hushed tones on whatever topics struck their fancy, today it wouldn’t do to be overheard.
The second they reached the third floor and found a tucked-away corner, Sarah spun in place, an animated expression brightening her countenance. “There now. With prudent people staying out of this dog soup of a storm, our privacy should be assured. So tell me,” she ordered, her hushed whisper barely disguising her eagerness, as she grasped Dorothea’s wrist to pull her closer, “have you sufficiently considered what I proposed last week?”
At the firm pressure on the recently abused skin, Dorothea’s breath hissed outward, but she managed not to betray the discomfort any other way.
“Do you not think it the most viable of solutions?” Sarah continued, her delight palpable.
Before Dorothea could formulate a reply—she’d pondered little else!—Sarah released her wrist and liberated a napkin from her reticule. “Here, eat this.” She pressed a cube of cheese into Dorothea’s thinly gloved palm and popped a smaller portion into her own mouth. “Nay. I don’t want to hear a single protest. Don’t faint as you did last week, and that will be thanks enough.”
The additional reminder of that mortifying experience was sufficient inducement, and the crumbling cheese went down as though it were the smoothest of nectars. “You are too thoughtful.”
“And you are too young to be fraught with such difficulties. Now tell me—will you take the next step and come tonight?”
Take the next step and admit she couldn’t care for herself? Admit she needed a man? A rich one, likely a titled one? A difficult task to be sure, when from Dorothea’s limited experience, the male persuasion had very little to recommend it.
“Take a lover, you mean? So I can eat? Does it not seem sordid somehow?” Sordid and immoral? But Dorothea knew better than to disclose that secondary concern, given how her friend lived the part Dorothea was only contemplating: the part of mistress, of paid companion. Of courtesan… The part of a lover.
Strange to consider, especially for someone who had, as an adult, never felt loved.
“Sordid? Not at all,” the elegant and older Sarah assured with complete certainty. “And you’re not taking a lover for the thrill, though I do hope he’ll give you plenty of those, you’re taking on a protector if you choose to move forward. And that, my dear, is an entirely different proposition.”
Grateful for the tall stacks of books waiting to be shelved in the corner they occupied, Dorothea ducked behind a rather impressive one. Reaching for the topmost book, she buried her flaming face in the open pages and allowed her gaze to fix on the lines of poetry. But she saw only a blur. Every speck of her attention was centered on the woman next to her and the illicitly intriguing idea she proposed.
If Dorothea did this, she’d become some man’s mistress, possibly by morning. If she didn’t, she might as well die because dramatic or not, that was where things were heading. She couldn’t go much longer without regular nourishment. Not and have the strength, or will, to fight off her grabby landlord and his unsavory advances.
“I…” Dorothea swallowed the stone that had taken up residence in her throat and quickly turned another page. Still focused on the thin volume shielding her face, she said, “I believe you may have the right of it. Lord knows everything else I’ve tried has failed to yield results. But how does one not versed in the trade go about finding a suitable protector?” Go about satisfying one, she really wanted to ask.
Dorothea had no illusions about her attractions. She had no station, no dowry, no claim to any particular talent—other than a keen interest but unremarkable ability on the pianoforte, an instrument her genteel mother had only just begun teaching her young “Thea” shortly before succumbing to a wasting disease.
How was Dorothea—a woman born of an earnest but impoverished shipping clerk, long since deceased, and wedded to a shopkeeper without any aspirations, more recently deceased—supposed to secure a wealthy patron?
“Mr. Hurwell was the only man I’ve endured intimate relations with,” she admitted in a small voice, rapidly turning pages to fan her heated face, “and our physical relations were…”
Lacking. Disappointing. Sometimes painful.
A cultured female hand eased into view and obliterated the unrecognizable words shimmering before her eyes. Seconds later, the book slid from her grasp when Sarah determinedly took possession. “Dorothea, child, look at me.”
At twenty-six, she was hardly a child, but she did as bade. “You must t
hink me incredibly gauche. I know you only seek to help. Why can I not claim your poise and confidence? The mere thought of attempting to entice a man with this”—Dorothea’s empty hands gestured to what she considered a less-than-enticing form—“churns my insides like cream into butter.”
Sarah’s smile was a balm. “You do have my poise, if you would but believe it. All women have it within themselves to feel confident and beautiful.”
Dorothea couldn’t help the snorted, “All women?” that escaped.
She was plain and skinny and she had no qualms admitting either. Her landlord Grimmett accused her of both and did so with increasing frequency, deriding how she’d likely not find a better offer. Offer? Was that how the weasel described forcing his attentions? And Mr. Hurwell? During the entirety of their eight-year marriage, her husband had naught positive to say on her looks. Or anything else for that matter, insisting the female mind was not adapted to troubling itself with conversation or concerns beyond the home.
Bah! She’d rather not waste thoughts on either of them.
“Aye, all women.” Sarah’s tone brooked no argument but it was the conviction shining from her gaze that arrested Dorothea’s attention. “And that is a gift the right man can grant.”
“A gift? How so?”
“A man who values you, your words and intellect.” Sarah’s eyes took on a luminescent glow. “A man who thrives on your passionate nature, why, he can make you feel the most desired and necessary creature on the planet, no matter that you counted three new wretched wrinkles that very morn. And plucked two chin hairs the night before.”
Dorothea bit off a laugh. Sarah may have been fourteen years her senior, but wrinkled and blemished she was not. Though a faint line or two was hinted at beneath her eyes, nary a grey hair peeked from the edges of her bonnet, and she had the kindest, most inviting face Dorothea had ever seen. That was one of the things Dorothea had noticed the moment the two struck up their first conversation the previous year, both waiting in line to inquire about the latest Miss Austen book, Mansfield Park.
Seductive Silence (Mistress in the Making Book 1) Page 3